Bitching and Whining Won’t Keep Kevin O’Leary Off Parliament Hill - The $15 (Canadian) Solution

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, let us Canadians try to not lose on a replay.

We’ve been here before (Rob Ford), we’ve watched the impending travesty in the U.S. with Trump, and for less than the cost of rodent repellant, you can nip this new pest in the bud.

Kevin O’Leary can join the race for leadership of the Conservatives, but there’s no guarantee he will win. And you can participate in making that failure a reality.

Join the Conservative party for one year for $15 and do it before March 28. Then vote against him on May 27th. I just joined this morning.

This guy isn’t remotely interested in being the Prime Minister of Canada. Anything along those lines is transcendent bullshit. He’s just another ego-in-search-of-a bigger-soapbox in a soulless parade of vanity and ambition. Give him the leadership of the Conservatives and you’ll be able to see the Canadian version of Trump’s political Ponzi scheme play out in front of you.

In today’s Globe and Mail [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/kevin-oleary-joins-race-for-conservative-leadership/article33653654/ ], it states plainly that even if he does win the leadership, he may even continue appearing in his state-side reality TV show. This kind of audacity worked in the US because 92,671,979 voters were a combination of disbelieving and, frankly, too lazy to get off their asses and get to a voting booth.

If you need more backstory, Arlene Dickinson handily nails him in her interview this morning: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/kevin-o-leary-conservative-run-arlene-dickinson-opinion-1.3942349

Can this be any more obvious?

Hoping O’Leary goes away won’t stop him.

Complaining about O’Leary won’t stop him.

Doing nothing won’t stop him.

Here are the details of the easy, affordable solution.

Step 1: Go to: https://donate.conservative.ca/membership

Step 2: Join the Conservative Party for 1 year BEFORE MARCH 28, 2017.

Step 3; The PCs will mail you a ballot for their May 27 leadership election.

Step 4: Vote strategically against Kevin O’Leary.

Here’s all it takes to qualify (which can be translated into being nothing more than Canadian, carbon-based and having a street address):

• I am a Canadian Citizen or a Permanent resident of Canada.
• I actively support the founding principles of the CPC.
• I am at least 14 years of age.
• I do not hold membership in another federal political party. 

You won’t have to travel to vote. In fact, you won’t even have to leave you own home. It’s easier than voting in a regular election.

It’s that simple.

It’s that easy.

It’s that important.

It Can’t Happen Here- Can It? And in the flick of a hand, it can.

There was something (there were many things, but this was different) that happened at the 48:02-minute point in Trump’s January 11^th press conference that troubled me. It was very small, very quick and very disturbing. With his eyes closed in self-benediction, Trump flicked his hand in a contemptuous dismissal of reporter Jim Acosta of CNN (later taking a question from a different CNN reporter).

QUESTION: Mr. President-elect, since you are attacking our news organization...

TRUMP: Not you.

[hand flick]

QUESTION: Can you give us a chance?

TRUMP: Your organization is terrible.

QUESTION: You are attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance to ask a question, sir? Sir, can you...

TRUMP: Quiet.

QUESTION: Mr. President-elect, can you say...

TRUMP: He’s asking a question, don’t be rude. Don’t be rude.

QUESTION: Can you give us a question since you’re attacking us? Can you give us a question?

TRUMP: Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question. I’m not going to give you a question.

QUESTION: Can you state...

TRUMP: You are fake news. Go ahead.

QUESTION: Sir, can you state categorically that nobody — no, Mr. President-elect, that’s not appropriate.

TRUMP: Go ahead.

That simple hand flick happened too early in the game for the President-Elect. It telegraphed condescension, derision, and a willingness to publicly humiliate. It reeked of personal more than professional payback as if he wanted to say, “You’re fired” but realized he doesn’t have the jurisdiction. It was a bully move.

For the next few days, freedom of the press is still protected by the First Amendment in the US. If it was up to Kellyanne Conway, who's inclined to make threatening statements such as 'Trump's critics should be very careful about what they say', the First Amendment might not always stay that way.

Should Trump, the 70-year-old millennial, attempt to outlaw criticism, there is historical precedent for it being something fast and drastic, but my guess is that it will most likely be a slow, progressive choke. All the signs are there. Right after the election, Trump refused to allow journalists to travel with him for his first meeting with Obama. Before his press conference last week, Trump reportedly asked his legal team if it is permissible to expel or restrict CNN and BuzzFeed News from the White House press corps. Evidently, that didn’t work, but at the press conference, he wouldn’t take their questions.  On January 15, the incoming White House press secretary repeated suggestions that Trump will deny reporters the traditional levels of White House access.

In 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor on January 30^th. It took him five days to start restricting the press and banning political meetings and marches. On February 28^th, the Reichstag was set ablaze – just the crisis he needed to enact his first decree: The Reichstag Fire Decree, otherwise known as Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State. That decree permitted restrictions on freedom of the press.

Preposterous in this day and age? Most definitively not. Up here in Canada the Good, it already happened. Stephen Harper was elected Prime Minister in 2006, promising openness and accountability, and then set land speed records in placing a stranglehold on the “Ottawa media elite.” MPs stopped returning phone calls from the media, cabinet ministers regularly refused to comment, security guards on Parliament Hill were ordered to keep reporters from hanging around near the cabinet room where they traditionally would wait for cabinet meetings to finish.

In Turkey, insulting the president is a crime punishable by up to four years in jail, but the law has rarely been invoked. Since Erdoğan became president in 2014, 1,800 cases have been opened. In December, Ece Heper, a dual Canadian-Turkish citizen was arrested in the city of kars in northeastern Turkey and charged with allegedly insulting the president in comments posted on Facebook. In one post, Heper accused Erdoğan of jailing journalists who suggested there is evidence Turkey is supporting Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL. 

Erdoğan has stated he doesn't care if people call him a dictator. That is something Trump will never do, in so many words, but he appears to have no problem behaving like one.

Old Year- New Year Reckonings

This column is being posted within the one-week period of the beginning of 2017 so these thoughts are still valid. After that, all bets are off.

2016 is over. It is a joyous thought shared by many, so I was a bit confused by the mid-December article from Vice.com which advised no one in particular that 2016 should not to be blamed. Vice then went on to provide a multitude of reasons why it was a completely shit year, each event occurring unrelated to each other thereby discrediting any cumulative significance. It was a minor nihilistic wank with a soupçon of absurdism. Blaming 2016 for everything bad that happened, according to them, is ‘weird’.

I disagree. I also sincerely doubt anyone actually visualized 2016 was a sentient creature intent on devouring all that was good. That said, anthropomorphizing a ‘year’ as bad and being glad to see the end of it, well why not?

Attributing powers to inanimate objects or dates (Friday the 13th immediately comes to mind) is a perfectly viable, albeit not scientifically substantiated, inclination. Urban primitive that I am (I know I’m appropriating the name of the former Toronto tattoo parlour of note, but I’m wearing some of their work, so I feel somewhat ok with this), I do it all the time with success. I set up small shrines in my office, stopping short of sacrificing woodland animals. I have little hand-crafted inner city Inuksuks that give me great comfort. Voodoo dolls are a little inelegant for my tastes if only because they lack the necessary aesthetics. And what is a dork shelf if not an alter venerating icons with deep meaning.

The act of doing so has a psychological name: superstitious behavior. It comes as naturally to humans as breathing. BF Skinner pointed this out in 1947 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology when animals (actually, it was pigeons) developed behaviours in an effort to control a specific outcome as a result of accidental juxtapositions between their overt behaviors and the presentation of rewards.  Sports fans, a subspecies of H. sapiens sapiens prone to any behaviours that make their teams win, know this works which is why Bud Light recently released an ad campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67gUGnYca3Q) with the tagline “It’s only weird if it doesn’t work.” 

I had difficulty understanding 2016. By that I mean that one sees life going in a particular way, factoring in family, friends, health, personal goals, career, good luck and bad luck, an understanding of your field of work, your community and the world in general. I’d absorb every new bit of news and move on, but after a while (like, April), it turned into an endurance test and by mid-summer, a chore. "When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness. a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all," Margaret Atwood wrote in Alias Grace. Sarah Polley used this passage as a preface for her documentary, Stories We Tell. You can’t understand the narrative of chaos without the bookends.

Taking the flying debris of celebrity deaths (for each, I did the inevitable age check), the irrationality of the US election and how to cope with it, adding in whatever personal traumas transpired, and wrapping them up in a tidy package to dispose of on December 31^st feels like the only sane thing to do. It offers the illusion of control and renewal and at this point, I’ll buy into the illusion because it’s better than the alternative.

The other way to go is to assess the emotions clinically. Calendar events like anniversaries or birthdays (particularly 0-year birthdays which feel more important that the in-between years) are milestones that you have made it thus far without self-combusting or ending up in prison. These are scattered throughout the year whereas Christmas and the New Year happen for us all at the same time, inspiring the end of the year accounting, the great reckoning and the urge to make resolutions about moving forward.

Given that year-end holidays are not the happiest time of the year- despite how much we’re told they should be- the generally held opinion that suicide rates spike at Christmas is false, but depression abounds. Armchair therapists speculate on the reasons one could be legitimately depressed, yet not one of them stands as a defining explanation. It could be the weather because there nothing like a wrist-slitter of a grey, damp, windy cold day in late December in Canada, but how does that explain depression in sunny California? The death or absence of a loved one during the holidays is absolutely sad, but sometimes it is the living who cause as much pain. The angst of being able to afford the best gifts for your family can be matched by the [first world] anguish of receiving gifts that signal that you are completely misunderstood by those who should know you best. There is the joy of hating the social isolation of New Year’s Eve, the holiday no one can ignore, not even for religious reasons. It’s made worse because everyone asks about what you did at midnight. The reasons go on, but never get you anywhere, except to reassure you that you aren’t the only one who loathes the season and wishes the calendar would just leap from December 19 to January 2^nd.

The fun continues into the new year. The first Monday in January is known as Divorce Day to lawyers. Yup, there are herds of people who wait until immediately after the holidays to break the bad news that they are departing a marriage. They do this so they can, ostensibly, preserve the illusion of family, but come onnnnnn, how much fun does that make the holidays.

January 18, the culmination of the depressing 30 day period that leads up to it, is called Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year - and the (rubber science) formula is: [W+(D-d)]xTQ/MxNA – where W is weather, D is debt, d monthly salary, T time since Christmas, Q time since failure of attempt to give something up, M low motivational level and NA the need to take action.  Of course this was devised by a publicist (a travel publicist, thankyouverymuch) in an effort to promote mid-winter vacations.

The very good news is that this depression is both predictable and short-lived. People forget that part and think it will go on forever - but it doesn’t. If it does, the issues are something entirely different and there are drugs for that.

For me, there is something about the end of the year that twists me around and makes me take account of the 12 months that came before. If I do not like what I see, I have to answer to myself for the results. If there are problems I can do something about, they become my resolutions. If not, I embrace my inner pigeon, shake my fist at the gods and blame the year.

By the time you finish reading this, the depressing stage of the year will almost be over and the most you’ll have to deal with are the sore muscles you have developed by sticking to your new exercise regime.

Bring it on, 2017. I can handle you.

Who’s Using Who? A Quick Test to See If the Media Use Trump for a Ratings Boost

Do you know you are being played by mainstream media, but want one easy-to-identify bit concrete proof?

Here’s a test.

Starting January 20, 2017, a report by New York Magazine reveals that Trump, once sworn into office, will gain access to the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) System. The WEAs, established by Congress after passing the Warning, Alert, and Response Network Act in 2006, deliver only three types of messages: Amber Alerts, critical emergency situations and alerts by the President.

You may not have registered this news item back on November 30, a mere 16 days ago. Why would you? The media likely distracted your attention with ... Trump’s tweets.  Covering Trump is a windfall like none other for network news, although there is not much proof made available to the public.

So, here is a test case, albeit rudimentary, you will be able to check for yourself.

To date, WEAs have never been used by a president, but soon Trump’s windbaggery will, potentially, blow into every American mobile phone whether they like it or not. Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project found that cell phone ownership among adults has exceeded 90% which means he will be able to send unblockable messages to 287.01 million people about how much he hates Alex Baldwin’s SNL skits.

The good news is his messages will be reduced down to 90 characters from his previously verbose 120 characters. The other good news for everyone north of the 49^th parallel is that there’s a virtual wall from the Atlantic to the Pacific which those texts will not cross, except in poor Alaska. I can just see the border signs now: Welcome to Canada. It’s safe to look at your phone now.

Wondering if Trump will be able to resist the urge is one thing? Given Trump not only doesn’t play by the rules, he seems to not actually care that there are rules, so odds are he well may use WEA’s.

Wondering if the media will cover this is the deeper question. At one point, Trump needed the media to communicate his message to the public. Then the tables turned in July, 2015 and he used social media to connect directly. The media then tailored their news to follow his social media messaging. Now, the media need his tweets more than Trump needs the media.

The test is based on the understanding that ‘news’ is information not previously known to someone. Since more than 90% of the public would get these messages, those messages will not qualify as news.

So if CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, PBS and all the other 3 letter sources of news run a story on every one of his messages, just like they have been doing since Trump took to Twitter during his campaign, the questions is why?

The answer: ratings.

What can you do about it? Well, changing your news sources is one option. It's also your choice if you'd like to let the networks in question know your thoughts.

Will it make a difference? If it does, the networks would never admit it.

On the off chance that mainstream networks stop reporting Trump messages (and you’ll know that because the Weather Network will also be reporting that hell has frozen over), rest assured that that subject will be ably handled by Alex Jones on Info Wars and Trump TV because it’s clear they won’t be covering anything else anyway. Besides, they’ll be doing one-quarter of the US population (that being the ones who voted Republican) a public service by offering remedial reading lessons. Viewers can move their lips when the newscaster reads the texts to them.